Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, Alexander Fleming found penicillin: in the 20th century, their merit was clear when they received the Nobel Prizes. In 2024, the Physics and Chemistry Nobels are unusual, and show that the nature of discovery is changing with the advent of AI. How?

On the stage of Stockholm this year we could observe a new act of the power held by the tech giants of AI: it’s a new performance that should keep us alert. It may be just a matter of doing new research with AI, but, together with their intention to fund a push for nuclear power to satisfy its needs of energy, we cannot sit down and applaud. We’ve done that with social media and are seeing the consequence in our new generations.

The justification of the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize to J J Hopfield and G E Hinton was “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”, the forerunners of AI. The prize was perhaps not for physics, as some physicists have said. It was perhaps mimicry, since they copied the human brain’s neural networks that neuroscientists took ages to discover and describe. They picked all that, transferred to the codes of computer science, then scaled up the number of educated artificial........

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